Looking for a big, badass motherboard that can handle almost anything you throw at it? Intel’s been teasing us with glimpses of the Sandy Bridge-E-compatible DX79SI Extreme Series Motherboard ever since the Intel Developers Forum a little while back. We’ve been drooling and waiting for more info ever since. Now, with little fanfare and no formal announcement, the company’s released a product brief that gets into details and outlines the DX79SI’s capabilities in full.

TomsHardware pointed us to the Intel website, where the official product brief is hosted. Aside from the obvious LGA2011 socket, Intel has managed to cram eight – you heard it right, eight – DIMM slots into the ATX mobo for up to 64 GB of total memory. There are ports and expansion options aplenty, too: three of those spiffy new PCIe 3.0 x16 slots, two PCIe 2.0 x1 slots, one PCI slot, two SATA 6Gb/s, four SATA 3Gb/s, 14 USB 2.0, four USB 3.0 (via NEC controller), two 1394a, and plenty of audio-out options.

In addition, the board fully supports both Nvidia’s SLI and AMD’s CrossFire technologies for multiple graphics cards. You’ll also find dedicated power and reset buttons and the now-familiar Intel motherboard skull logo.

Comments

Why not make all the sata ports 6gb/s and put USB 3.0 in the chipset? (better yet, have all the USB ports except 2 or so be USB 3.0, so you can use the 2 USB 2.0 ones for the keyboard when you don't have the USB 3 driver loaded in Windows)

It's configured that way to keep the electrical paths between the CPU and Memory Dims short and symetrical. I guess if you're worried about warming the memory too much you could go the liquid cooling route.